Bobby Bluebell

In And Out The Dusky Bluebells. Bobby Bluebell interviewed 12.09.85 by Roy Moller and Douglas Clark Spanky Farrell’s Interview (fanzine)

Photo (some years later) by Martin Gray.

After the relative failure of All I Am, the Bluebells have been, in the words of Bobby, “taking a long break”. After having to change bass players twice because both of them ran off with their girlfriends, they have now settled down with new bassist Nick Clark (ex- Cuban Heels and Shakin’ Pyramids) and are going into the studio with Daniel Miller in November to record new material, so don’t expect a new Bluebell record till 1986. Our interview begins in Berkeley St. studios with Bobby confirming that Alan Tarney (producer of Cliff Richard’s "We Don’t Talk Anymore" and "Wired For Sound") wouldn’t allow lead vocalist Ken McCluskey in the studio during the recording of their single "Sugar Bridge".

Bobby: We had a big house, a big studio in it, dead posh, nice smell of disinfectant, clean and tidy, and I was like that. “Oh…hi. This is my song”. And he’s going, “Oh, that’s really nice; it really reminds me of Dvorak”, and I was going “Aw?” Next day I brought Ken, right and Ken was going (sniffs) “Awright, then? That’s fucking pish.” He (Tarney) phones up the company the next day and says “Can you just send Robert down. I don’t really need Ken there”. I walked in and he’s going, “Hope you don’t mind not having Ken here but my wife didn’t like him”. You can’t tell Ken this, he thinks I’m making it up, but it’s true.

"Sugar Bridge" didn’t lead anywhere for the band and is laden with a particular drum roll that Bobby describes as “really horrific…something like Phil Collins”
The 12” of "All I Am" has a really naff edit on it.

It’s fucking shite, innit? We hate doing 12 inches. I did a fly one for "Cath", right. It’s fucking terrible: they (Ken and drumming brother Dave) go mad every time they hear it.

"All I Am" didn’t get played on the radio because it stopped and the record company hated it. They don’t like a surprise: “Imagine you’re eating your breakfast, Robert, an’ you’re finking bath catching the bus, right. All I Am’s suddenly on the radio and “aw, what the fuck’s that?”

London Records wanted to cut a noisy guitar part from the track and Booby says he wishes he’d let them as he originally thought of "All I Am" as a dreamy kind of song but was persuaded in the studio to put the works on it. He also points out that both "Cath" and "All I Am" would have been bigger hits with decent exposure….

The only way to beat the record company is to do nothing. The unfortunate thing is you have a hit and then everyone in the world gets involved…If you had the personality you could kick up a fuss like Edwyn did, but no one’s interested. He was really unfortunate cos Lloyd Cole was just signed and he was anything but kicking up a fuss and Edwyn couldn’t sing and at the end he had a pretty nasty personality. And Lloyd Cole, he’s got a really great band. Edwyn couldn’t play guitar very well and David McClymont wasn’t a very good bass player but they got Zeke in and had a hut, right. I hate "Rip It Up", wish they’d never put it out…Then he (Edwyn) started getting involved with people like Clint Ruin and Stevo, all that Bizarro lot, going “Edwyn, why don’t youu have a bit of screaming in this song. I’ll do it for you. Waaaargh!…And it’s really avant garde but it’s hardly fucking gonna be a hit, right? And you reas all the Orange Juice interviews and it’s “oh we really want to be Top 10” and all that and as soon as they get it they do everything to stop it.


The video for "All I Am" was hilarious – Ken with a dogcollar on…

We took it down to London, right. I wasn’t there. I was in Glasgow, lying in bed. This must have been about five past two in the afternoon and the phone rang: “You fucking bastard!” It was the record company. I just hung up. They were going “You can’t get it on TV – a priest and all that” and I was going “look, Sting was on, Spread A Little Happiness, with a dog collar and all that. (Growls). “Different kind of song”.

How did they react to Young At Heart on Top Of The Pops – Ken wearing NHS specs?

They were almost crying. They told us how much damage it would do to our sales. They went crazy. He couldn’t get them off, right? If you watch the video he’s trying to get them off. I wanted to put a hearing aid in, the whole thing, make him look like Morrissey. Just a pure piss-take…We played in Berlin, went down really well – and it’s probably the most trendy city in the world bar New York, right? “Ja, seen it all before, ja”. We came back on and said “Right, we’re going to do The History Of Rock’n’Roll and played every song we could think of from 1957 onwards, ending up with (Culture Club’s) "The War Song" and The Thompson Twins’. It took ages and ages. Next day in the papers: Kick Down The Statues! This is national newspapers y’know and they thought it was us destroying rock’n’roll; we thought it was us taking the piss.

When we move to the Spanky Farrell Office at Kent Road, Bobby tells us what he did, or rather didn’t do, on his break. But his inactivity is nothing, he says, compared to the sloth of Roddy Frame..

I didn’t play records for ages and ages cos you get dead fed up, especially if you’re in the business… write a lot of songs at once, then nothing for ages. I mean, look at Roddy: he hasn’t written a song for ten years. He had to do his l.p. and I was getting phone calls from his manager: “Remember I was talking to you ages ago and you said you had an Aztec Camera demo?

Still got it? “Thinks so, aye”. “What was on it?” “Oh, "Green Jacket Grey", "Real Tears" and "Abbatoir” ". “Are they good? D’you think you could send us it?” He wanted to put it on their l.p.
I used to fall out with Alan Horne all the time. I knew about Aztec Camera before them. They wanted me to join Aztec Camera. “Aw, they’re really good, Hodgey, but they cannae really write the pop songs. You should get in there, right. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Hodgey: I was gonnae put you in Orange Juice, they could back you, but I’ll put you in Aztec Camera. You can write songs for them, OK? Think that’s good idea, Hodgey?” “Naw”. “Aw, Edwyn thinks it’s a good idea…”
Edwyn played with us, he was our first bass player. He was my best pal at the time: “Come on Robert, come round here, have you got any songs? Oh, that’s a really good one”. He’s got really suspicious about everybody. The first time I met him "Falling And Laughing" was about to come out, and they were sitting there having meetings and Brian Superstar was sitting there going “you can’t put that out, it’s the exact same as Talking Heads”. “You think so? Aw fuck, it is a bit like it” – this is Edwyn and Alan. “All that money, aw no!” Real paranoia…
Aztec Camera were just pure Joy Division, then Alan Horne got them listening to Decade by Neil Young: “I’ll tell you how to get it, Roddy. There you go, pal, there you go” – and he come back later on. And he’s got all these songs. It’s the God’s honest truth, y’know?
..Primal Scream: the b-sides’s exactly the same as my first demo. Stephen Pastel pointed it out to me. I remember Bobby (Gillespie) when they were all anti-Postcard, anti-Velvet Underground. I was caught between both camps. They used to hate that stuff…I remember exactly, talking about the Velvet Underground, how it all started. They had a four-week thing in Sounds about the Velvet Underground, had the Bunnymen talking about it, had nothing to do with fucking Postcard, y’know? You’d go down to Paddy’s Market and then you’d go back up the road and it’s like “Oh, I’ve got a Velvet Underground l.p, y’know?” “Oh?” And there’d be about ten guys there trying to find another one.

And with that, Bobby heads out from the Spanky Farrell office, leaving us with a reminder of the old Postcard slogan, adapted from Vic Goddard,: “We OUTPOSE all rock and roll”, (rather than "oppose"), and taking with him a pair of 3D glasses we gave him that we’d pinched from John Menzies.

Below is a version of Sugar Bridge from a TV show called Switch: